Engraved

I saw my best friend lying in bed, her hair almost gone, except for small tuffs of strands lying against her pillow. Different colored wires circled in and out of her body trying to keep the disease from eating her alive. A yellow bucket was next to her bed just waiting for the chemo therapy to make her puke the remainder of the food left in her stomach.

Both of the girls’ parents were sitting in the small wooden bench beside her thin mattress. The patient, my friend, was asleep. She said that when her eyes were sealed shut, the world changed around her. In her dreams, she was healthy, had full luscious blonde hair that curled at the tips, and bounced when she ran. She was able to do all the things she couldn’t do while strapped by wires to her cot, as if everything was normal, as if everything was okay.

Her mother nodded at me as I lie next to her daughter, and put my head against her fluffy pillow. Her eyes fluttered slightly as she turned her head to look at me.

“Hey,” her voice is barely audible.

“Are you doing okay?” I whisper, staring into her bold green eyes.

She laughs lightly, “Not really,” she says. “Look at me.”

“You look beautiful,” I tell her putting my hand on her shoulder. “You’ll make it through this.”

She turns to her other side, so her head leans off of the bed, and the food is gone from her stomach. I automatically hand her the water bottle on the night stand. I give her my last jolly rancher. “I brought you something,” I tell her slowly releasing something from my back pocket, revealing a navy box.

She slowly opens the box and sees a thin silver bracelet with our names engraved together with a small heart in between. She gently places her head on my chest and I see the corner of her mother’s mouth curl upward. “It’s beautiful,” she says smiling.

“You disserve it,” I kiss her on the forehead again before saying, “stay strong, I have to go to school now, but I’ll see you after okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” She smiles slightly before closing her eyes.

“That was sweat, thank you for being here for her,” Her mother tells me as I leave.

I smile back as a reply and leave the hospital, already excited that I’m going to get to see her again after school. At school I get a call from the front office, saying there is a call for me from my dad.

“I am so sorry son.” He says, it sounds like he’s been crying; which he never does.

“You’re lying,” I say, my knees all ready starting to give way.

“I wish I were,” He says. He tells me that she had felt nothing when she passed away. The cancer had finally over powered as she had slept. He said that she didn’t feel anything, but simply stopped breathing. He said that she was in a better place now.

I think that she is in that place she went to while her eyes were closed. The place that made her healthy and normal, the place that made her happy.

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